This Night’s Foul Work

himself slipping towards the forbidden and feared chaos. Since then, she had brought him a cup of hot coffee twice a day at eleven and four.

He heard her put down her bag on the fifth floor. The idea of leaving his broom cupboard that moment once and for all, so that he would never see this young woman again, made him rise from his chair. He tensed his arms, looked up at the skylight and considered his face reflected in the dusty pane. Abnormal hair, ordinary features, I’m ugly, I’m invisible. Veyrenc took a deep breath and muttered to himself:

‘But I see that thy soul is filled with sudden fear,

Thou, the victor of Troy, hero without a peer,

Who gained both the city and people with great art.

Can a woman’s fair face make tremble that brave heart?’

No, no way. Veyrenc sat down again calmly, cooled by his four lines of dramatic verse. Sometimes it took six or eight, other times two were enough. He took up his copying task once more, feeling pleased with himself. Grains of sand pass, birds fly away, control remains. There was no cause for concern.

Camille stopped at the fifth floor and shifted the baby on to her other arm. The simplest thing would probably be to go downstairs and come back after eight o’clock when the duty officer would have changed. The nine conditions of the warrior are to flee, according to a Turkish friend of hers, a cellist at the church of Saint-Eustache, who was a mine of proverbs, as Byzantine as they were incomprehensible and beneficial. Apparently there was a tenth condition, but Camille didn’t know what that was and preferred to make up her own version. She took the letters and the groceries out of her bag and rang the bell. The stairs had become too much for Yolande, whose legs were weak and whose bulk was great.

‘Such a shame,’ said Yolande, opening the door. ‘Bringing up that child on your own.’

Yolande said this every day. Camille would go in, put down the provisions and the letters. Then the old lady, for some reason known only to herself, would offer her some warm milk, as if for a baby.

‘It’s OK, it’s quite all right,’ Camille would reply automatically as she took her seat.

‘No, it’s no good. A woman doesn’t want to be on her own. Even if men are nothing but trouble.’

‘Well, there you are, Yolande. Anyway, women can be nothing but trouble too.’

They had exchanged these remarks a hundred times, almost word for word, but Yolande never seemed to recollect that. At this point, Camille’s comment would plunge the large old woman into meditative silence.

‘In that case,’ Yolande would then say, ‘they’d do well to keep apart, if love just brings them both grief.’

‘Could be.’

‘But you know, my dear, you shouldn’t keep putting them off. Because when it comes to love, you can’t always do what you want.’

‘But Yolande, who’s going to do for us what we don’t want to do?’

Camille smiled, and Yolande sniffed by way of reply, her heavy hand moving to and fro across the tablecloth in search of a non-existent crumb. Who? Why, the Powers-that-be, of course, Camille silently completed the answer. She knew that Yolande saw the signs of the Powers-that-be everywhere. This was her private pagan religion, which she didn’t talk about much, for fear that it might be taken from her.

Eight stairs from her landing, Camille slowed down. The Powers-that-be, she thought. Who had parked this man with the crooked smile in the cupboard outside her apartment. He was no better-looking than average, if one didn’t look too closely. But much better-looking if one had the bad idea of thinking about it afterwards. Camille had always been susceptible to elusive features and undulating voices, which was why she had spent fifteen years, on and off, in the arms of Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, and kept promising herself not to return to them. To him or to anyone else blessed with that subtle sweetness and treacherous tenderness. There were plenty of men in the world who were less difficult to pin down, if one wanted a bit of straightforward contact that would allow you to come home relieved and peaceful, without needing to think about them any more. Camille felt no need of permanent company. Why the hell, then, had some chance dictated, thanks to the Powers-that-be, no doubt, that this guy on the landing, with his husky voice and his crooked lip, should touch her senses? She stroked the head of little Thomas, who was dribbling as he slept on her shoulder. Veyrenc. With his strange black-and-tan hair. A grain of sand in the works and an inconvenient disturbance. Distrust, vigilance and flight.

VII

NO SOONER HAD ADAMSBERG LEFT ARIANE THAN A HAILSTORM SWEPT OVER the Boulevard Saint-Marcel, blurring its outlines and making a Parisian avenue look like any country road drenched by a sudden flood. Adamsberg walked on contentedly, since he was always happy in a downpour and was now also satisfied to be able to close the file on the killer in Le Havre after twenty-three years. He looked up at the statue of Joan of Arc, who was bearing the assault of icy hail without flinching. He felt heartily sorry for Joan of Arc; he would have hated to hear voices telling him to do this and that. He already had enough trouble obeying his own instructions, or indeed even identifying them, and would have seriously objected to orders coming from celestial voices. Voices like Joan’s would have taken him into the lions’ den after a brief and glorious epic struggle, since that kind of story always ended in tears. On the other hand, Adamsberg did not object to picking up the pebbles that heaven placed in his path to charm him. He needed another one for the Squad, and was searching for it.

When, after the five weeks’ compulsory leave ordered by his divisionnaire, he had come back from the Pyrenees to the Paris Crime Squad, he had brought with him thirty or so grey pebbles, washed smooth by the river, and had placed one on each of the desks of his colleagues for them to use as paperweights or anything else they pleased. A rustic offering that no one dared refuse, even those who had no wish to keep a pebble on their desk. An offering which did not help them understand why the commissaire had also brought back with him a gold wedding ring now to be seen on his finger, and striking sparks of curiosity from every doorway he passed. If Adamsberg had got married, why hadn’t he told the team? And above all, who had he married, and why? Had he finally and straightforwardly married the mother of his son? Or somehow forged a fraternal union with his long-lost brother? Or a mythical one with a swan? With Adamsberg, all solutions were possible, as rumours flew quietly from desk to desk and from pebble to paperweight.

It was generally expected that Commandant Adrien Danglard would resolve the puzzle, partly because he was Adamsberg’s longest-standing colleague, having spent years alongside him in a relationship which allowed for no concealment or precautions, and partly because Danglard couldn’t stand Unsolved Questions. These Unsolved Questions cropped up at every turn, like dandelions, turning into a host of uncertainties, fuelling his anxiety and making his life a misery. Danglard worked ceaselessly to eliminate the Unsolved Questions, like a maniac who keeps trying to remove non-existent specks from his coat. The gigantic task usually led him to a dead end and then to a feeling of powerlessness; the powerlessness, in turn, drove him down to the basement of the building, where the bottle of white wine was concealed, the only thing that could help him deal with any Unsolved Question that was too thorny. If Danglard took the trouble to conceal his bottle so far away, it was not for fear that Adamsberg would discover it, since the commissaire was, by some supernatural means, perfectly aware of his secret. It was simply that going up and down the spiral staircase to the basement was sufficient of an obstacle for Danglard to postpone calling on his heart-starter until later. So he patiently gnawed away at his doubts at the same time as he chewed incessantly at the ends of his pencils.

Adamsberg had developed a theory running exactly contrary to the pencil-chewing, which posited that the number of uncertainties a single person can support at the same time cannot multiply indefinitely, and reaches a maximum of three or four. That did not mean that there were no more, but that only three or four uncertainties could be in proper working order simultaneously inside a human brain. Danglard’s mania for eradicating them was therefore futile, since no sooner would he have resolved two Unsolved Questions than another two would take their place, and he would not have had to concern himself with these if he had had the wisdom to stick with the old ones.

Danglard had no time for this hypothesis. He suspected Adamsberg of liking uncertainty to the point of inactivity. Of liking it to the point of deliberately creating it himself, to cloud the clearest perspectives, for the sheer pleasure of wandering irresponsibly through them, in the same way he liked walking in the rain. If one didn’t know